Bernie Sanders' primary 'Vacation': What does he tell his supporters when it turns out Wally World is closed?

By S.E. Cupp

|NEW YORK DAILY NEWS|

May 31, 2016 | 12:57 PM

Over the course of the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders has been on an epic road trip — the kind...

Over the course of the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders has been on an epic road trip — the kind Hollywood loves to write. There have been all the scripted triumphs and pratfalls that befall anyone who packs a bunch of noisy, excitable people in a car and attempts to get them all across the country in one piece.

But like the affable, earnest and seemingly doomed for failure Clark Griswold of "National Lampoon's Vacation," Sanders' family vacation will likely end with disappointment in California, the mythical Walley World closed for repairs, his passengers frustrated with nowhere to go.

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The question is: What's Sanders' final act? Will he break into the park so the family can ride the roller coaster anyway? After all, the actual coaster the Griswolds rode in the movie was called "The Revolution." Or will he concede before the convention and tell all his people to go get on board Hillary Clinton's uninspired ride to the White House?

Sanders — who's won 20 states, earned nearly 10 million votes and 1,500 pledged delegates — has convinced not a small number of people to hop aboard the family truckster and take part in a thrilling primary adventure pitting him against Hillary Clinton. If this were a general election, 10 million votes already blows other third parties out of the water. Ralph Nader won less than 3 million votes running in 2000, and some claimed even that was enough to play spoiler to Al Gore against George W. Bush.

The reason Sanders'is vowing to go on to the Democratic National Convention, even though he in all likelihood cannot clinch the delegate count is because he cares less about winning than proving a point. This, to be clear, is hardly novel — during his 1965 run for mayor of New York City, "God and Man at Yale" author William F. Buckley, Jr. said that if he were actually elected he would "demand a recount."

Fun while it lasted (Damian Dovarganes/AP)

Sanders wants economic inequality under a bright spotlight this election cycle — and he wants the next President to be held accountable for it. And he's already had a considerable impact determining the terms of debate and forcing Clinton to veer leftward. As Sanders himself admitted in an interview with Rolling Stone, "Hopefully we will end up winning the nomination and winning the general election. If we don't do that, which is certainly a possibility, we will have accomplished an enormous amount."

The fact that he's a self-described Democratic socialist who wishes America were more like Sweden — with higher income taxes, bigger government and loads of "free" stuff that we actually pay heftily for — has hardly been the non-starter many insisted it would be. And, in an unexpected plot twist, he actually shares a lot in common with the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, who, sometimes intentionally, helps hammer home Sanders' message on trade and Social Security. Trump even recently said he'd want his GOP to be a "worker's party," although I'm not sure that means the same thing to Trump as it does most socialists.

But if Sanders knows winning the nomination is impossible, he hasn't told any of his supporters that. He and his campaign have been using words like "messy" to describe what's could be coming at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

"Democracy is not always nice and quiet and gentle," he warned, later walking that back after many suggested he was tacitly condoning violent protests.

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Herein lies his problem. You say you want a revolution? You got it, but possibly one with nowhere to go. It will be incumbent upon Sanders to guide his car full of people to an actual destination instead of a mythical fantasyland that never manifests.

We'll learn a lot about him after California. If Clinton wins, Sanders can either drive his supporters back home to a united Democratic Party, or he can crash the convention and leave them stranded, angry and without a candidate to support.